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Fun for birders and book lovers

February 10, 2009

Fred Bortz's picture

My book reviewing work sometimes brings me interesting e-mails. For instance, today I got one from a book publicist with the question “Which bird is named after soiled underwear?”

Normally, I don't get involved with book publicity. However this was too much fun to resist. I don't plan to review the book, so I hope no one accuses me of having a conflict of interests here. Here are excerpts from the e-mail and the publicist's blog.

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What do our interactions with birds reveal about ourselves? In Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott looks at the myriad ways we encounter and appreciate birds.

To support the publication of Birdscapes, we'll be posting bird trivia drawn from the book on our blog each Tuesday over the next few weeks. I hope you’ll have a look and post your guesses, answers, explanations in the comments section.

The first question “Which bird is named after soiled underwear?” went live today:
http://press.princeton.edu/blog/2009/02/10/birdscapes-trivia-question-1/

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Enjoy!

Fred Bortz
Children's Science Books
and
Science Book Reviews

Comments

And the answer is...

February 11, 2009 by Fred Bortz, 40 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 34461

The Isabelline Wheatear (click for details).

Too bad my friend who suggested the song thrush because of its Latin name turdis turdis was wrong!

Fred Bortz
Children's Science Books
and
Science Book Reviews



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